[Fair warning to list readers: this one is theory-ish, and has no
pedagogical utility]
 
Herb,
 
My experience with serial verb constructions comes primarily from doing
some work on Khmer years ago, and since Khmer is isolating -- there are
some fossilized affixes, but nothing productive - establishing
dependency relations and finiteness in pairs of verbs can be difficult
(I tried using differential modification, but was never sure what the
results really meant). I'm thus using a far looser definition of 'serial
verb' than I should be ("a construction involving seriated verbs used as
if they're a single unit"). That said, I can't help but wonder whether a
(hypothetical) serial verb construction that develops from a previous
finite+dependent nonfinite pair might retain the morphological markings
of dependence on the second element without it actually being dependent
in terms of cognitive processing (and yes, that begs a giant question of
what "dependence" means in cognitive processing).
 
Now, immediately I want to object to my own point, based on its
empirical problems - I've just come up with a reason to rationalize away
any inconvenient counterevidence. It may be possible to get some support
for the idea from psycholinguistic research, though. At a very, very
informal level, I've noticed that when I ask beginning linguistics
students to "split" sentences into constituents, they readily split some
verb combinations but not others, and I can't help but wonder if their
behavior represents psychological reality (whatever that is) better than
some of our models do. 
 
Bill Spruiell
 
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
 
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